.
Carl and Alice now reside beside each other as
small
piles of grit – sieved into the brass receptacles
that
bear their names; my brother Bob is similarly
packed
in brass two thousand seven hundred ninety miles
away
.
insensible to masses he once led and prayed in at
St Thomas’s Episcopalian Hollywood Boulevard array
of granite grey occasion for haute Anglican
gesticulation,
three minutes’ amble west of Grauman’s in L.A. –
.
my parents in a backroom of St Mary’s Anglican
brown
shingled nineteenth century Long Island edifice
devoted
to not worrying about obfuscatory Soul. My brother
Bob’s dust lies inside an obeliskish Monument (though
.
maybe not, I might have made it up) etched
letters
in its stone in praise of him as priest. He tried
but couldn’t
break the least blip in the spell of AIDS. These
are
the passing grades Religion gives to those who
don’t,
.
as I will, throw myself as is my wont upon the upstretched
angry spears and blades that wait to rip my
consciousness
to shreds, crush the mess into small bits of
carbohydrate,
protein, mineral and fat that I’ll exactingly have
told
.
executors to roll into soft pellets to regale descendants
of the dinosaurs, particularly those ferocious
sparrows,
fierce as wanton arrows, who don’t give a flying
flip
if any other sparrow gets a share. Let me end the
way
.
the Dinosaurs began, as evolutionary oddity whose
single efficacy would eventually be to let their
dead
collective rotting body fertilize and nourish
antecedents
of what in three hundred million years would turn
.
into a German mother’s embryo that would become
the man who’d engineer the Autobahn and drive
as
fast upon it as he’d dare. No speed limit there.
I’m
not sure. Did I just write a prayer?
.
.
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